Simplify your IBM Power admin

Background

As a family-owned company in the fourth generation, Balluff successfully unites German Mittelstand tradition with the cosmopolitan outlook of a global player. With its combined workforce of 2,750 throughout the world, Balluff is one of the leading providers of industrial automation solutions. Apart from its headquarters in Neuhausen auf den Fildern, just a few miles from Stuttgart, Balluff has production and development sites and 61 international branches and representative offices spanning the globe.

Project

When the lease for its two IBM Power 7.750 servers was up, Balluff took this opportunity to put its planned switch to in-memory computing (DB2 BLU) into action. In the process, its storage environment was placed on a new foundation with the assistance of Axians.

The new Power design was realized on the basis of two IBM p750 systems,
each providing for 32 high-performance Power 7+ CPUs and 1 TB RAM. This switchover also saw the introduction of Axians’ Dynamic Power Cloud Manager (DPCM). The goal was to reduce the complexity and administrative overhead of the new IBM Power environment to an absolute minimum, while standardizing many processes and implementing a total approach to IBM Power and LPAR monitoring.

Yet the idea of deploying DPCM was also to enable Balluff to perform administration and, above all, tuning independently, i.e. without being dependent on outside assistance. The advantages of the new solution were demonstrated via a proof of concept (PoC). The PoC showed that the database response times were accelerated significantly and admin simplified substantially thanks to DPCM.

But what was most persuasive was the fact that changing requirements could be responded to immediately without any assistance from without. DPCM also provides for more reliability: in the event of a disaster recovery, LPAR profiles and the AIX operating system can be restored on the same or another system within a matter of minutes by way of an automated process. Manual disaster recovery is also enabled via an integrated Recreate feature — not only for the IBM PowerHA cluster, but also for the other systems not secured by the cluster. Also, disk handling has been simplified significantly and can be performed by the admins on their own without having to possess any in-depth SAN knowledge. A special user role (viewer) for the IT head also enables a quick picture to be obtained of the system, capacity management and performance charts.

The creation, adaptation and maintenance of AIX LPARs has been automated and standardized by DPCM for the most part, enabling configuration errors to be avoided and the stability and availability of the platform to be enhanced. By deploying DPCM, the interaction with the FlashCopy Manager during LPAR backup and cloning has also been optimized.

Benefits

• Administration of IBM Power environment without external support
• Creation and administration of LPAR profiles made easy
• Fast disaster recovery